Entertainment Editor-at-Large, Los Angeles

Miranda Otto will play the female lead in the US version of Rake. Photo: Sahlan Hayes

Australian actor Miranda Otto has been cast as the female lead in the US remake of the hit Australian drama series Rake.

Otto will star opposite Oscar-nominated actor Greg Kinnear who is playing Keegan Joye, a brilliant but self-destructive defence lawyer.

In the Australian version, the same character is named Cleaver Greene and is played by Richard Roxburgh.

Richard Roxburgh as Cleaver Greene in the original Rake.

Otto will play Maddie, Joye's former wife, who is also "acting as his psychiatrist".

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Otto has worked for several years in the US film and television industry, notably in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film cycle and the US TV series The Starter Wife and Cash-mere Mafia.

The US version has been in development since last year with Sony Pictures Television.

Last month the US Fox network gave the green light to a pilot.

Most of the show's Australian creative team - Duncan, Roxburgh and producer Ian Collie - has been retained by the US production as executive producers, along with a US writer/producer, Peter Tolan, and a US producer, Michael Wimer.

Kinnear, the show's star, is also an executive producer.

An outline of the pilot, circulated to US trade media, describes the character as an addict who is "brilliant, frustratingly charming, and with zero filter".

Production of the pilot will begin soon, so it can be screened to Fox network executives and international buyers in May.

The series is based on the career of Australian criminal barrister Charles Waterstreet, who co-created the series.

Waterstreet expressed frustration this year that he had been marginalised from the show's migration to north America.

Essential Media produced two series of Rake for the ABC and a third is in development.